EVGA Killer Xeno Pro: Victory Weapon or Placebo Effect?. Page 7

The graphics accelerator is usually the primary guarantee of high performance in contemporary games. However, when it comes to online battles, there are other factors to consider, which may sometimes prevent you from enjoying the game to its fullest. Is there any way to fight them? EVGA is certain there is, and we will try to figure out if it is indeed so.

Performance in 3D Games

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

The Killer Xeno Pro brings no benefits at the lowest resolution but we do see some difference at 1680x1050 and higher. It is no larger than a couple of frames per second, however, and can hardly be of any practical value. The increased bottom speed of the GeForce GTX 285 at 2560x1600 is good, but we did not feel that the gameplay got much more comfortable. The average performance growth is no higher than 3% here.

We must confess we could not test this game together with uTorrent. If the torrent client was launched, the game refused to connect to EA servers or provoked disconnects. In some lucky moments when we did get through to the server, we could not play normally due to terrible lags irrespective of the network adapter installed into the system. Well, that’s why serious online gamers disable all torrent clients, FTP sessions and everything else that might affect their connection speed before they launch their game.

Still, the Killer Xeno Pro helped reduce the ping time from 83 to 79 milliseconds on average. Since statistics claims that an average man’s reaction to a visual stimulus varies within 150 to 300 milliseconds, this can hardly be called a serious advantage in online gaming.